One of the first bay area tech events i remember attending when i moved to San Francisco three year ago was an unconference event. An unconference is a conference where the content of the sessions is created and managed by the participants (generally day-by-day during the course of the event) rather than by organizers in advance of the event. Honestly i was skeptical of the whole idea because i come from a corporate conference culture of "we must wear black slacks and white shirts so we can look uniformed at the booth" (thank goodness that was recently dropped!) and sit in the audience and listen carefully. What i have learned however after attending a few of them is that unconference events are a great way to build communities and get things done!

One of the people who has been extremely valuable to have as part of the DataPortability Project that i am involved in is Kaliya Hamlin who is an old pro at building communities in the tech world. Since 2005, Kaliya has been facilitating the Internet Identity Workshop and has received considerable praise for helping achieve real results, including the incredible progress of OpenID and other user-centric identity projects. She along with others in the Identity Community have an open invitation to all for the upcoming Data Sharing Workshop on April 18th and19th and the Data Sharing Summit on May 15th.

Why should you consider attending?

The primary goal is to provide a gathering space for everyone to work together to build consensus around and get adoption of emerging dataportability standards. Both events are part of an ongoing collaboration with DataPortability.org, which we all hope to evolve into a larger-scale Data Portability conference in the near future.

Here are the details from their event listing:

The Data Sharing Workshop (April 18th and 19th)
As a first step, the Workshop will provide a gathering space for different groups to have in-depth discussions about emerging data sharing standards and initiatives, and continue ongoing work by establishing Action Items to be carried out at subsequent events.

The Workshop will be held at the SFSU downtown campus in cooperation with the SFSU Institute for the Next Generation Internet add it to your Upcoming if you plan on attending.

The Data Sharing Summit (May 15th )
The Summit will take place a month later, providing enough time to further develop the ideas discussed at the Workshop while still being able to track progress. With the larger venue, participants from the Workshop will be able to share their ideas with a broader audience.

The Summit will be at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Ca, immediately following the Internet Identity Workshop, allowing those in the user-centric identity community to participate in the Summit. Add it to your upcoming.

Additional information is available on the Data Sharing Summit Wiki.

If you have any questions about any of these events, or would like to get involved as a volunteer or sponsor, please contact Laurie Rae at laurierae@datasharingsummit.com

See you there!

Blog post Image by jdlasica

In a recent must read post on ReadWriteWeb on Semantic Web Patterns: A Guide to Semantic Technologies Alex Iskold writes "People simply do not care that a product is built on the Semantic Web, all they are looking for is utility and usefulness." Are they also willing to pay for access if the utility and usefulness meets their needs- i would venture to say yes.

Found via a new favorite blog of mine, John Breslin's Cloudlands a new website for Art fans that goes beyond traditional museum, journals and events calendars by providing a platform that users can use to create a personal lens into the Art worlds that interest them . I have not tried it myself but MutualArt.com sounds like a prefect application of "the promise" for the semantic web and perhaps? it is the first 'semantic app' that is collecting a membership fee (paying members at $300 per year).

They have a good short overview video on their web page but they don't allow you to embed or even link to it directly (or at least i couldn't figure it out so it is on the right side of the page). For Art lovers this seems like a great service because it seems to provide a very targeted service to learn and live Art.

The target audience is probably a well engaged one that would gladly pay for a premium service that helps them organize their commitments in the art world. What makes it semantic? According to their press release: The MutualArt.com site is powered by proprietary state-of-the-art semantic Web technology, uniquely filtering vast quantities of diverse art information, so that only information relevant to users' tastes and interests is delivered to them. They claim to have done two years of research and development so it isn't a simple website and probably will indeed provide a valuable resource to aggregate and make sense of the art news and events. They are claiming to have the largest collection of art related articles on the web, social features and events calendars to deliver information that is important to the specific user.

A good case study for media providers that have niche markets and increase commoditization of the content they provide? Crain's New York called it "A new Web Service promises to do for art what the Bloomberg terminal did for finance" perhaps one day in the future they will review financial niche services and say "a new service that promised to do for for finance what MutualArt.com did for Art".

I am always looking for good resources to use as quick introduction to topics that i can share and videos tend to be one of my favorite things to reference if i can find them so i keep a handy list of topics that i can send off to people like Taxonomy Management Tools, DataPortability introduction, RDFa introduction, a Case study titled From Taxonomy to Ontology and a Simple Semantic Web Intro among others i can quickly reference.

This evening i found these videos from the 2005 Content Management Pros Summit where Theresa Regli and Seth Earley debate the pros and cons of various taxonomy issues by flipping a coin to see which side they will take debating each issue. Both of them can obviously argue both sides of the coin because they have heard it all from their customers and i think the format works well and is instructive on the topic:

• Introduction
• Do taxonomies make managing content easier?
• Do content management systems need a taxonomy to function?
• Is there such thing as a galactic taxonomy/uber taxonomy?
• Does a taxonomy have to have at least three levels?
• Isn’t taxonomy the same as navigation?
• Are subject matter experts necessary to create a taxonomy?
• Can taxonomy development be managed as a project?
• Taxonomy Automation
• Automatic Classification
• What's an Ontology?
• Credits

Loren Feldman of 1938 Media is quite a character and a bit controversial at times some of his classics include Stop Crying, Anti-Social Media, and the oh so classic Gabe goes Geek Hollywood.

Here Feldman talks to Chris Saad founding member and chair of the DataPortability Group. I admit i was waiting for a what's "a little guy like you running a big movement like this" comment (sorry Chris ;-) but this is a straight up great conversation on what the DataPortability Group is about.

Of course only in a Loren Feldman video does the 'user' become 'Joe Blow'- which of course lead me on a chase of where the phrase 'Joe Blow' originates. i found some simple definitions and that it occurs mostly in the States and Australia (hence why Chris was so comfortable with it!) but not too much on its origins which seems to go back to the 1940s to describe the average guy. I grew up in north Jersey so it was a common phrase i heard often.

The WI-FI analogy that Chris uses at the beginning and towards the end of the video to describe what regulars 'users'- sorry the regular "joe blows'- should actually think of when they eventually see the DataPortability logo on a site is a very effective analogy. When we see a WI-FI sign on cafe window, we don't think of all the complicated protocols that enables WI-FI to happen- we know that it works, what our security options are (well we should) and that there are standard access protocols for all WI-FI networks. DataPortability aims to do the same for your data on the web.

Last year i really wanted to go to the annual Semantic Technology Conference (SemTech) but i was too late to the game from a budget perspective and at over $1500 it wasn't something that i could pay for myself like many of the local conferences (and unconferences) i go to where it is 50-100 bucks. It also ended up conflicting with something else on my work agenda so instead of being a brat i let it go. This year I am there and i am already prepping for it so i can get the most out of it.

The schedule with speakers has been posted on the conference site and in addition to attending the sessions and meeting some of the vendors in the space, i am also super excited about meeting a lot of the key members of the Semantic Web Community, some who have also recently been participating in the DataPortability Group that i am a founding member of.

The other thing that I am very excited about is that our very own Christine Connors will be presenting a session which i outline below on Semantic coding in the world of fast paced publishing.

Since late 2007 when she joined Dow Jones, Christine has been in addition to Director of Semantic Technology Solutions for Dow Jones the Business Champion for Synaptica , our taxonomy and metadata management tool that i am now responsible for from a Business Development perspective. I have to say that the last few months working with Christine and the Synaptica product team has been one of the most exciting and satisfying parts of my eight year career at Dow Jones/Factiva.

The funny thing is that i had seen Christine present at other conferences while she was at Intuit and i admit i kinda hounded her when she was at Intuit because i wanted to tell her what Factiva (now we are Dow Jones) was doing in the space- the message after she joined us i got was that Factiva and especially the Synaptica and Taxonomy business was not doing a very good job of telling the marketplace what are core capabilities were (perhaps however she was just being nice and i just couldn't sell it ;-0 ...all kidding aside I am aware that we still have a lot of work to do but if anyone knows me that is reading this i am always up for cheer leading for a winning team- and i think i got one of those now.

Semantic Coding at 120mph

Christine Connors Global Director, Semantic Technology Solutions Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

Tuesday, May 20, 2008 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM How does a company with massive amounts of real-time data and high availability requirements migrate to the Semantic Web? Very thoughtfully! Join this session for a "day in the life" view of content from creation through processing and on to delivery. Along the way, learn how to efficiently cluster processes and technologies to intelligently migrate from legacy systems to the Semantic Web. Learn how taxonomies and ontologies integrate with entity extraction and rules-based processing to enable near real-time delivery of business critical multimedia content from thousands of sources. See how Dow Jones uses Synaptica, the 1.5 million+ proprietary codes of Factiva Intelligent Indexing, as the foundation of a technical stack that allows content to be processed in less than a minute in a 24x7 global coding and publishing operation. Christine Connors joined Dow Jones in 2007 as Global Director, Semantic Technology Solutions. Her primary responsibilities are for Synaptica product development and overall metadata strategy, in partnership with the Business Champions of the Factiva and Dow Jones Newswires family of offerings.

UPDATED April 30th:
Christine has been added to two additional sessions at the conference- Yeah! :
Financial Services Industry *Sidebar*-Through examples, this session will examine how, and in what process categories, semantic capabilities are being leveraged within the Financial Industry. We will then discuss where else, within the broad context of the financial space, these approaches may be applied.
Bringing SemTech Back to the Business-With a panel of leaders from the semantic technology industry, this session will give us the opportunity to reflect on the many discussions that have taken place during the week of SemTech 2008 and help us map the course as we prepare to extend those conversations back into our workplaces. We will touch on issues of ROI, making the case for semantic technologies in the enterprise, and what to expect in the coming year in the semantic tech space.

Lately i have been feeling that i am indeed a part of something very special, something that is proving that people with passion can work together to achieve something. It isn't the first time a bunch of very intelligent people in the tech community come together in this way to establish standards but it is the first time that i have been involved in such depth and some of it is blowing my mind. I am one of the original members of the DataPortability Group and sometimes i simply can not believe how far we have come in a short few months- we only started in mid November (check out our on-going timeline) .

The February DataPortability Project Report is now available that highlights the work that the DataPortability group has completed since our inaugural report in January. i am sure some out there might still say that we haven't produced much but we have even beyond what is highlighted- setting goals, reaching out to existing communities, indoctrinating new members and bringing up the issue of data portability across the board from main stream media to topics of conversation at every tech event over the last few weeks- that all takes work and passion and the community is giving back in full force.

On a recent Steering group conference call when discussing what a specific Action group had been working on, one of the attendees said 'well we have been doing a lot of reading'- yes we all have been doing a lot of reading and thinking and talking. I think an amazing amount of energy by certain members has been dedicated to these 'conversations', much by people who i have followed in the tech community for a while which i am very please to see participating.

I admit that this month was tough for the main group that i participate in the Evangelism Action Group- many of us have projects that are important to move forward with but where bogged down in making a decision around which platform we should use to develop and store all our documentation (and important task!). Some of the conversations in the chat rooms could have been enough to make everyone pull out their hair at times (well at least i wanted to)- but the group eventually worked it out. The final decision was to keep the Google Group for the discussions, Skype for the group chats and move all the Google Pages to the Confluence wiki platform, a decision that i think will suit us well for the next phases of our projects.

Online interactive applications that allow you to consume and interact with data visually always impress me. As a user, i just think it is cool and it distracts me from the boring text blobs i am mostly interacting with. But as someone concerned with delivering all types information types to users, i am also always curious because i know that these technologies will continue to enhance information delivery and how users will expect to interact with data regardless if they are at work or play.

I was catching up on the Mix08 news this evening and saw this live site of Microsoft's Silverlight Deep Zoom technology that allows users to browse photos of Hard Rock's multimedia collection.This gets filed in the cool folder.

Aside from being able to zoom in on the promo wig from the Rolling Stones 'Some Girls' album you can also zoom into Keith Richard's strange Italian Guitar with built in speaker and Bob Dylan's 1991 Harley Davidson Soft Tail Custom Motorcycle among a lot of items of interest.

I wonder if there is plan to overlay music as well- perhaps an integration with some of the online music providers would be interesting. It however doesn't seem to be indexed by their search tool because i did a search on Bob Dylan and the motorcycle did not come up although other Dylan memorabilia did - the text is there within the object description (putting aside the topic of image search itself) so maybe that is just an oversight on their part at the moment.

Back in October (wow i can't believe it was that long ago-this is how i get wrinkles!) Peter Reiser, Mike Briggs and Neeraj Mathur at Sun Microsystems took Robert Scoble , Greg Merkle and myself through an overview of what they were building for their customer engineering group around Community Equity.

This week Peter posted additional details on his blog because they have finally filled patent on the work they had been doing- Congrats to the team!

You can also read Peters original public thoughts and passion for Community Equity as a way to measure Social Capital for an enterprise.

The post provides an overview of all Equity values- Information and Personal (Participation, Contribution, Skills, Reputation etc.) that are captured for the participating communities. I find the Information Equity (IQ) piece quite interesting because it is about the object itself and what was done to it:


The Information Equity captures the social activities around an information and dynamically calculated a numeric value which represents the importance, relevance and quality of an information. An information can be a wiki page, blog post, document etc.
* How many times users have viewed an information
* How many times this information had been downloaded by the users (in case of attachment)
* How many times this information were re-used by an individual
* Users feedbacks (ratings, comments)

In a shared collaborate Enterprise environment the notion that the document is 'scored' proactively by set standards in multiple ways and that information is stored within the document is quite important- because when a person leaves essentially their personal equity is no longer valuable (ok it might take a while to degrade but you understand my point). Other items that they are addressing that are quite important in the Enterprise space include:
- document reuse around information equity
- equity aging

He promises to keep us updated on the work they are doing so if you are interested make sure to subscribe to the specific subject /Community Equity.

Update: Robert Scoble interviews Peter Reiser on the road.

Sometimes it is hard to forget that there are thousands and thousands of search engines beyond the big ones we are mostly aware of like Google, Yahoo!, Windows Live Search, Ask.com etc. If you ask people, maybe if they are 'in the know' might call out ChaCha, Mahalo, or Hakia but most likely those will only sound like exotic gelato flavors to them.

For almost a year, the AltSearchEngines blog - member of the Read/WriteWeb blog network- has been covering hundreds of alternative / niche search engines and it is one of the places i go to to get the 'scoop'.

Charles Knight is an industry analyst and Editor of AltSearchEngines. From their About Page: "While the editorial attitude will not be “anti-Google”, it will certainly be “pro-alternative search engines” - a showcase of cutting edge innovation. Our goal for AltSearchEngines is to make it the definitive destination for everything related to alternative search engines - over 1,000 of them!"

The site is nicely divided into the following categories:

• Top 100
• News
• Reviews
• Debates
• CEO Views
• Global
• Verticals
  

On a recent post, Knight writes that they are planning to start a Database of search engines which will be great so you can quickly drill down to all the information that has been gathered via the postings.

I also just noticed this evening that they also have a new subscription based forum that offers a one month free trial which i just signed up for- although there doesn't seem to be too much activity right now.

Flickr Gelato image by Klara Kim